Abstract
Theodore Kemper’s Status, Power and Ritual Interaction is an ambitious and impressive contribution to the study of social interaction. Kemper, who long ago established himself among sociological social psychologists as a leading theorizer of emotions and social interaction, lays out his status-power theory in relationship to the analyses of ritual interaction provided by Emile Durkheim, Erving Goffman, and Randall Collins, the set of sociological theorists who have achieved canonical status in this area. His argument is persuasive and convincing in revealing the limitations of the ritual theory of social interaction of Durkheim, Goffman, and Collins and in establishing the superiority of status-power theory for understanding what happens when humans interact with one another.
In the first two chapters of the book, Kemper lays out the premises of his status-power theory. Although these chapters reiterate ideas that Kemper developed beginning in the 1970s, these chapters offer a fuller, more cogent, and more persuasive case for status-power theory as a broadly generalizable theory of human interaction and emotions. Less detailed presentations of Kemper’s status-power theory make his theory easier to dismiss as overly simplistic and naïve in its assumption of status and power as the predominant concerns in social interaction. But in this book, Kemper conceptualizes status and power such that these dimensions cover a wider range of social phenomena and human motivation than sociologists typically associate with status and power. To say that humans seek to maximize status and power in social interaction, in other words, is not to suggest a universal tendency for human beings to approach relational activity in the spirit of competition to be the most respected or the most powerful. It is rather to say something more basic, that “what gets everyone up in the morning and what explains behavior, motives and choices during the day is largely relational” (p. 2). The major aims of individuals and groups, Kemper argues, “can be understood and expressed as processes involved with gaining and/or maintaining status and power and with according status to and avoiding the power of others” (p. 2).
The third chapter of the book, in which Kemper presents a series of derivations from status-power theory, was probably the most compelling and pleasurable to read. With this chapter, Kemper demonstrates the utility of his status-power theory by showing what it can help us understand. Kemper is already well known for his status-power theory of emotions, but he also takes up in this chapter theories of ideas and reference groups, the self, motivation, and play. His discussion of reference groups in relationship to status-power theory is the most illuminating, since it is this discussion that makes clearest the broadly encompassing meaning of status and power that he employs. Kemper defines a reference group as “any person or group with whom one has a status-power relation, whether real or imagined” (p. 34). Kemper argues that human action can best be understood as involving status-power relations with a person’s reference groups, only sometimes represented by actual people who respond directly to our behavior. If we consider the immense variety of reference groups with which individuals might have status-power relations, then we can expect an equally broad array of human motivation.
Relatedly, Kemper debunks the concept of “the self” in this chapter, arguing that status-power theory taken to the extreme leaves no self that is worthy of sociological attention. Instead, what we typically think of as a self can better be understood as the convergence within a person of the variety of reference groups with whom that person carries on status and power relations. What makes one person different from another, then, is that the pertinent reference groups for one person differ from that of another. The recipient of the praise and approval of the reference groups, Kemper argues, is not the self conventionally understood but rather the human organism. Relational rewards, he argues, are powerful insofar as they are associated with organismic rewards. In early years of life, words of praise were associated with organismic rewards such as hugging, kissing, and caressing; in time, however, the words of praise come to evoke organismic satisfaction on their own.
The first three chapters of the book provide an exceptionally lucid and detailed explanation of Kemper’s status-power theory. For those not already well-versed in this theory, these first three chapters would serve as a valuable introduction to what has already been established as a leading theoretical perspective in sociological social psychology.
The larger part of the book, however, analyzes the theory of interaction as ritual in Durkheim, Goffman, and Collins, making the case that the status-power theory provides a better understanding of the phenomena analyzed by each. This part of the book will be of most interest to social theorists, many of whom may not know Kemper’s work precisely because of the exclusive canonical status of the Durkheim/Goffman/Collins line of sociological theorizing about social interaction. Kemper is meticulous in his analysis of the details of Durkheim’s, Goffman’s, and Collins’ development of the interaction ritual theory, convincingly making the case that none of them can account effectively for the success of interaction rituals without analyzing the status and power relations at stake within them. After convincingly revealing the flaw of these theories, Kemper reads each theorist in terms of status-power theory. If the reader follows the details of Kemper’s analysis and critique of each of these theorists, I am convinced that they must come to the conclusion that the status-power theory has greater explanatory power than the interaction as ritual model. For social theorists and students of social theory, Kemper provides an excellent model of how theoretical work can yield clearer understandings of social processes and thereby productively contribute to the larger discipline.
After systematically reading and critiquing Durkheim, Goffman, and Collins in chapters four through twelve, Kemper wraps up the book with a few very nice chapters. One is a chapter on emotions that compares status-power theory with interaction ritual theory, demonstrating the superiority of the former as a guiding framework for the sociology of emotions. A second is a chapter on love and sex in which he shows how status-power theory can help us to make sense of the dynamics of intimate relationships and the primacy of sexual desire.
The final chapter provides a thoughtful analysis of status-power theory as both a predictive and a postdictive theory, or Theory 1 and Theory 2. Over his long career, Kemper has achieved recognition for his contributions to Theory 1, having produced theoretical propositions that he has tested with empirical research. In this chapter, however, Kemper argues that post-diction is good enough when it comes to developing a theory of emotions. That is, rather than using status-power theory as a basis for predicting emotional responses (as he has done in many empirical studies), he recommends employing status-power theory following an emotional experience as a way of understanding what had transpired in any given social interaction. This is a particularly important point. Although status-power theory has been and can continue to be empirically tested and refined with experimental studies, I carried a nagging doubt through my reading of this book about its overall predictive power in real-life situations. On the one hand, I was pleased to discover the breadth of Kemper’s conceptions of status and power. But on the other hand, if people differ from each other with respect to the array of reference groups with whom they engage status-power relations, then it would seem to be impossible to reliably predict behavior or emotional response without knowing a person’s guiding reference groups. I was pleasantly surprised, then, to find Kemper argue for post-dictive theory as a good enough theory of emotions.
I have had a very long engagement with Kemper’s book. Note that the book was published in 2011, while it is now 2014. My intention was to produce the review in a timely manner, and when life circumstances interfered I maintained my intention day after day for three long years. My copy of Kemper’s book is well worn. It has traveled with me every day in my backpack for nearly three years, since I intended to finish that review each day of my extremely lengthy period of tardiness. I have carried it to doctor’s appointments, to family reunions, and anywhere where I thought I might have found some minutes to read it. Most days it got out of my backpack to be read, and always for these three very long years was the book on my mind. Each night as I have wound down before sleep, I have found myself analyzing the experiences of the day and my own internal dialogues in terms of Kemper’s status-power theory. I found it particularly useful for analyzing my internal dialogues, since it led me to name the operative reference groups with which I was engaged in internal dialogue and to consider my status-power objectives with respect to each of them. I would suggest that the application of Kemper’s framework provided the means for the most lucid and deepest self-reflection. Whether or not one agrees with Kemper’s contention of the uselessness of a concept of self, I think Kemper is certainly right that there is no better way to understand a person’s sense of self than by analysis of a person’s status-power relations with their guiding reference groups. I deeply regret being so extremely late in producing this review, but I have no regrets for the long period of time I have spent thinking about Kemper’s theory. Kemper’s book is a top-rate contribution to the discipline of sociology as a whole.